Q - Why did you start DT Horses and what was the plan and the goals?
A - When I rodeoed professionally,
DEAN TUFTIN INTERVIEW
I saw the need to raise the right kind of horses that were real top end Rodeo horses. That’s when I started my focus on Team Roping horses, and that is what I specialized in. As I was rodeoing, I would be in common areas of the Country and sometimes look for horses, or try horses for myself, my partner, and friends. Nine times out of ten the horses were not the quality that we were looking for. They weren’t broke good enough, sometimes they had been roped on and they were good rope horses, but they didn’t have steering or brakes. So, people would rope on them and they ended up as rope horses because they were rejects from reining, cow horse, cutters and sometimes off the ranch. More often the ones that were successful were the ones where somebody spent some time getting them really broke. You could just feel it in the horse. So, my focus was to create a program, raise my own horses that I thought were true athletes and were not rejects. We have a process where we start them and get them super broke, we took our time, and we did all the right things to give the horse the best opportunity to be successful. That is really how we started. That was back in the early 2000’s. I started the business with my Mother-in-Law. She had a barrel racing horse that went to the National Finals. So, my job right off the get-go was to try and find matching mares for that stallion. And we did, but by year two he had broken his leg. At that point we were stuck without a stallion and we had all these mares. We fast forward it a little bit and bred the mares around, then bought the first couple of stallions and within a few years we started to win some AQHA World Championships in roping. It was pretty fast! We found kind of a magic combination in what we were doing. The type of stallion I found was key. I found him through Carol Rose and my mares that I was breeding. I think we have 10 or 12 AQHA Championships now. Horses that were mostly grown & trained 100% on my ranch. We have had three PRCA/AQHA Horses of the Year, three runner-up Superhorses at the AQHA, we have had two Senior All-Around in the AQHA. The AQHA World people know who we are, but in Scottsdale Arizona they know us for roping. We expanded that with the addition of Hickory Holly Time. We started breeding him and we also started adding the cowhorse operation to the roping operation. That was around 2011, and we had our first finalist in the Snaffle Bit around 2011. So that has been going on about a decade now. We have won several runner-up’s, we won the World’s Greatest Horseman, we have been Reserve Champion at the Derby, at the Snaffle Bit. We have definitely put our stamp on the Quarter Horse industry with our horses. To make a long story short, we went 28
from a mom and pa operation where I was riding the horses and training them, into several trainers. We have upwards of about 130 horses right now. We have half of the operation, all of the horses in training, here in Scottsdale and all of the mares, babies and stallions are in Weatherford Texas. Our operation is really big right now, with everything from a twoyear-old trained, on up, right here in Scottsdale. We breed about 25 to 30 babies a year at our peak. Being a roper and trainer myself, I really did not have any deadlines on the horses. I would train them until I saw fit. The first few we shipped off were very, very successful.
Q -- Bret Paulick on Illbeyourhickleberry, out of your stallion
Hickory Holly Time won the NRCHA Snaffle Bit Futurity Non-Pro in 2020. How did that make you feel?
A - Last year was very exciting for us at the
NRCHA Snaffle Bit Futurity. Not only was Bret’s success huge for us, but we had five Hickory Holly Time’s in the Top 25 in the Open Finals. So out of 300 horse, five of the Top 25 were from our stallion. In the year previous it was his first group of colts. The first year we won it but lost in a tie breaker on the fence. We had a six-point lead going into the fence work. It has been a couple of really exciting years with his babies, and we are looking forward to more of that success going forward.
Q - Hickory Holly Time won the World’s
Greatest Horseman in 2018, after a Championship show career and now is standing for you at Oswood Stallion Station. How is that working out?
A - We are really happy to be partners with
Oswood’s, they have done a tremendous job breeding and shipping semen for us all throughout the World. We have bred horses from Australia to Italy, to Brazil, to Canada and here in the United States. We have bred a lot of mares over the last five years. It has been very successful, and now we have launched his baby 1910 who is his most successful baby until this point, out of the great Lil Miss Shiney Chex. She is the top cow horse producing mare of all time now. We own her as well. We are breeding 1910 this year (his first year), so we have a junior stallion under Hickory Holly Time as well.
Q - You have three beautiful stallions: Hickory Holly Time,
Nineteen Ten, and Metallic CD, and a broodmare band of 18 fancy horses. What do you look for when matching horses for your breeding program?
A - I was always a big stickler with my mares. Every mare that we
bred when we started out, I rode. I knew how they moved, how they thought, how they performed. It felt like that gave me a real insight
MAY 2021
